Eric S. Lane, Stephen M. Scherr and Ashok Varadhan were named to the firm's management committee, according to a separate memo yesterday from Blankfein and Cohn.
Lane, who former Goldman Sachs executives say is also close to Cohn, was promoted last month to be co-head of the firm's investment-management division with Timothy O'Neill. Scherr is global head of the financing group within investment banking and also assumed responsibility for Latin America when Kevin W. Kennedy retired last year. Varadhan is global head of currencies and emerging markets.
Goldman Sachs named James R. Paradise, 47, and Eiji Ueda as co-heads of the trading business in Asia, according to a separate internal memo dated Jan. 10. Paradise, who's based in London, and Ueda, based in Tokyo, will move to Hong Kong to assume some of the responsibilities previously held by Yusuf A. Alireza, who left in November after 19 years at the company.
Paradise and Ueda will report to Katsunori Sago, deputy president of Goldman Sachs Japan, and to David C. Ryan, who serves as president in Asia outside Japan, according to the memo.
Goldman Sachs may post fourth-quarter profit of 75 cents a share when it reports results on Jan. 18, Barclays Capital's Freeman wrote in a research note last month. That would be down from $3.79 a share a year earlier and would mean the lowest annual earnings attributable to common stockholders since 1998, the year before Goldman Sachs went public, according to Freeman.
The changes at Goldman Sachs are just beginning, Freeman said in the phone interview. He pointed to still-incomplete areas of regulation such as derivatives, the so-called Volcker rule, which places limits on proprietary trading, and the adoption of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision's rules on capital requirements.
"As the rule sets around Volcker, derivatives and Basel get finalized over the course of the first half of this year, that frees up these firms to finally move forward in restructuring these businesses, and that may result in further headcount or management changes," Freeman said. "You could see something broader this year or maybe next year."